Tag Archives: gosling green

Recently I’ve found myself dipping into areas of uniform beyond the auxiliary forces, thanks to access kindly given to some great primary sources. One is a tailor’s notebook in the Anne S K Brown Military Collection at Brown University: “Rigementals” is a collection of “Memorandoms” compiled around 1813 by the tailor William Stothard, with some fascinating drawings and notes.

One puzzling item is titled “Native India Regiment” and dated 1811: an officer’s jacket with silver vellum lace in pairs and facings of gosling green – a yellowish or brownish shade, depending on who you read, produced, according to one period encyclopedia, by blue dye followed by a dose of annatto or anatta, an orange colouring. Anyway, here’s Stothard’s description of the jacket, in his characteristic, but alarming, phonetic spelling:

A Jackit, made of superfine scarlit cloth. Gosling green facing, cuffs and coller 7 hooles of twist in the lapel by 2s one in the coller with a large button, three silver vellam holes top of the lapel Pointed flap with 4 lace holes. cross flaps 4 Lace holes on the cuffs. White Casemer turnbacks & skirtlining, Lace Back & front A dimond on top the Back slit Lace to go down to the ornaments. 1811
12 yards Lace.
Lapell made to button back. 1811.

Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library

It’s interesting that this is a battalion company jacket, rather than a coat, at this period, while the paired seven button arrangement, rather than the more usual eight or ten, is abnormal. However, in a preface on “Tailours Rules,” Stothard includes a seven button arrangement in pairs, where the tailor marks out ten singly spaced buttons and then omits three: “Every tailor knows these things, etc.” Most unusual of all are the double turnbacks – reminiscent of the style of a decade previously – and the lace “diamond” at the top of the rear fly. Note that just the top three button holes each side are laced, only the triangular upper parts of the lapel facings being intended to show.

Another item drawn in the book is tied to the workshop of Jonathan Meyer in Conduit Street W1, where Stothard may conceivably have been employed for a while. A surviving ledger of 1809 is still in the keeping of Meyer & Mortimer, and sure enough, a few pages in we find a corresponding entry for a jacket for an officer of the “Native India Regt” which may well be the item noted down by Stothard. (My thanks to Meyer & Mortimer and to Ben Townsend for access to images of the ledger.) The page is half destroyed, so that the client’s name, the date of the job and the opening words of each line are missing:

While Meyer specifies eleven yards of silver vellum lace, Stothard gives twelve, but otherwise what remains is an excellent match. In total, the jacket cost £8 15s 3d, equivalent to well over £600 in today’s money.

So what was the “Native India Regiment”? No formation with the name is recorded, so Meyer and Stothard must be referring to an unspecified regiment of that character. Thanks to the distinctive gosling green facings, this can only be the 9th Madras Native Infantry, whose buttons at the time were paired and whose officers wore silver lace. I know next to nothing about the dress of the armies of the Presidencies of the East India Company, so I’ve no idea how typical or how well documented elsewhere this unusual style may be.